Wish You Were Here (35 page)

Together they went through peaks and troughs of elation and despair, and inevitably Sue came to care deeply for Douglas, great affection vying with equally great exasperation. “He was a misfit,” she said, “a large, left-handed man with an odd perspective who lived in a world that was designed for an altogether more straightforward, right-handed sort of person.” Her connection with him also did no harm to her own career, and his wicked parties provided access to a remarkable network of the élite. It was through Douglas that she met (and later published) Stephen Fry, for instance, a frequent guest at Douglas’s table. “Who is that woman,” Stephen recalls asking Douglas, “who hangs about the house while we’re laughing, to whom you give the occasional piece of paper?”*
 
¹⁷³

The writing itself was not getting any easier. It was around this time that Douglas uttered his remark, cherished in literary circles, that writing was just a matter of sitting in front of a blank piece of paper “until your forehead bleeds.” He had spent a lot of 1986 editing
The Utterly, Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book,
to which he had given his time for free, but which proved more demanding than he had expected. It required him to coordinate myriad people and details—not a skill that Douglas had manifested to an acute degree as a producer.

He had also been working on
Bureaucracy,
another computer game for Infocom, the company which had sold a gratifying number, mainly in the States, of the first
Hitchhiker’s
game. It was inspired by his own move to Upper Street. To his chagrin he had found his credit cards had been invalidated by Barclay’s, for they had sent his new cards to his old address despite the fact that he had filled out a change of address card personally and handed it to them, right there in his own branch. Getting the “system”—an abused word for what is often an inchoate and foolish procedure sanctified only by time—to recognize his new location was a torment that lasted for two years. Douglas was provoked into some excited correspondence. A brief extract from his letter to Miss Wilcox at Barclay’s will give a flavour.

[A history of his attempts to inform the bank of his new address plus excruciatingly explicit contact details . . .]

[My Address] is at the top of this letter. It is also at the top of my previous letter to you. I am not trying to hide anything from you. If you write to me at this address I will reply. If you write to me care of my accountant, he will reply, which would be better still. If you write to me at Highbury New Park, the chances are that I won’t reply because your letter will probably not reach me, because I don’t live there any more. I haven’t lived there for two years. I moved. Two years ago. I wrote to you about it, remember?

Dear Miss Wilcox, I am sure you are a very lovely person, and that if I were to meet you I would feel ashamed at having lost my temper with you in this way. I’m sure it’s not your fault personally and that if I had to do your job I would hate it. Let me take you away from all this. Come to London. Let me show you where I live, so that you can see it is indeed in Upper Street. I will even take you to Highbury New Park and introduce you to the man who has been living there for the past two years so that you can see for yourself that it isn’t me. I could take you out to dinner and slip you little change of address cards across the table. We could even get married and go and live in a villa in Spain, though how would we get anyone in your department to understand that we had moved?

I enclose a copy of my new book which I hope will cheer you up. Happy Christmas. Yours truly

In revenge he was inspired to write
Bureaucracy,
in which the player finds himself unable to get his own money after moving to Paris, whence, via a series of bureaucratic mishaps, he ends up somewhere very much stranger. Having designed the architecture of the game, Douglas became fascinated with learning how to program, when what was needed was simply for him to write all the ramifying text variations. Despite an excellent understanding of computer languages, he lacked the patience for programming; the project started to run late. Infocom staff are credited with helping him finish it (primarily, according to the website, the mysterious hacker W.E.B. “Fred” Morgan), and so is Michael Bywater who was quietly drafted in to help too.

The result of all these commitments was that when Douglas got down to work on
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency,
it was screamingly late. He’d been thinking about the book on and off for three years, and by the time Sue Freestone started working with him it was already six months past the “this time we really mean it, absolutely no messing about, this-is-it” deadline. Douglas had written one single sentence. However, Sue reports, it was a brilliant one.

Critical opinion varies about the Dirk Gently novels. I like them a lot, especially the first. Alfred Hickling in the
Guardian
thought that the third,
The Salmon of Doubt,
was shaping up to be the best of the lot when Douglas died. It’s certainly complex, very enjoyable and more relaxed than the first two titles. Kate Schechter, first seen in
The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul,
reappears as a fully rounded female character—unlike Douglas’s earlier women characters who tend to be foils for the men to express some impossible romantic and sexual yearning.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
is Douglas’s authentic voice—darkly funny, full of fresh invention (even though it owed something to his
Dr. Who
plot), overly complex, and suffused with anxiety. There isn’t the same joke quotient per line as in the
Hitchhiker’s
novels, but overall the effect is just as satisfying.

The Electric Monk is a delicious idea; we have labour-saving devices to spare us effort—why not an electric monk who can believe
really stupid
things for us?*
 
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The plot is unsynopsizable. It combines jokes about Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lamarck, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, academia, Schrödinger’s Cat, literary magazines, jealousy, death—a whole chocolate box of intellectual goodies—with inadvertently saving the world. Douglas had just read Gleick’s book
Chaos
for Heinemann and given it a rare pre-publication quote.*
 
¹⁷⁵
Usually he resisted blandishments from publishers to give quotes because he felt it devalued the currency and he was prickly about his acceptability by the literati. But in the case of
Chaos,
he said, “it was like turning on a light in a dark room.” The ideas of chaos theory underlie much of
Dirk Gently.
*
 
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It is no accident that Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the central figures in the story. Like Douglas, Coleridge, one of the greatest narrative poets of all time, took the reader and his Ancient Mariner into the unknown. Coleridge’s narrator in that poem is a decent man who makes one mistake. For this, all his fellow mariners die, and he is subjected to an extremity of nightmarish suffering before eventually finding redemption, of a kind. Arthur Dent is in a similar predicament: caught up alone in a bewildering universe—one which sneakily had appeared so safe and familiar—with a whole planetful of people blown to atoms behind him.

Famously Coleridge was also thwarted in the middle of a masterpiece when the Person from Porlock interrupted the composition of “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan . . .” Douglas, however, was his own man from Porlock. Jane Belson recalls that if he couldn’t find a man from Porlock, he’d pull one in from the street.

It was the desire to get it right. I think his block was more to do with fear than perfectionism. He was frightened he couldn’t do it. What he found hard was having these completely off-the-wall ideas which had to be combined with the perfection of the writing. Douglas wasn’t confident he could do it, and he did worry dreadfully. I think he went and looked for distractions in order to avoid facing the possibility of failure.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
contains within it a brilliant essay about music and mathematics (“Music and Fractal Landscapes” by Richard MacDuff). It’s typical of Douglas that he contextualized it within the narrative in a way that gently parodies scholarship, thereby disarming any accusation of pretension before it’s been uttered. Nevertheless, that essay is the most beautiful account of the connections not just between music and mathematics, but between mathematics and the universe.

Among mathematicians and physicists the subject of “MacDuff’s” essay is a hot topic. Even for a layman, you’d need a soul like a safety deposit box not to find it fascinating. Is mathematics an organizing principle of the cosmos, or merely a language that helps creatures of our peculiar configuration to isolate aspects of it? A snail does not need to “know” about the Golden Mean when making its shell any more than a sunflower understands the Fibonacci sequence. The snail and the flower self-organize into those exquisite patterns because of the way atoms interact at the quantum level. But why do atoms behave that way? This is why quantum physics is the science from which all others flow. Is it just coincidence, then, that such phenomena—extending upwards to great spiral galaxies—lend themselves to such elegant mathematical description? Does mathematics define the universe any more than grammar? Maybe both just help us talk about it; much brainpower has been expended and many books written on this subject. It is wonderful to find it so entertainingly touched upon in a popular bestseller. Douglas believed passionately that such apparently arcane ideas were at least as appropriate to so-called commercial fiction as sex and shopping—and a lot more interesting.

This essay within the novel is a reminder of how good Douglas’s non-fiction could be. His journalism is beautifully structured, often very funny and always illuminating. Jane remembers that he could do the same in conversation:

Douglas had this extraordinary capacity to convey information in a most subtle way. He was a natural teacher. His analogies were wonderful. You would get what he was about to tell you about a millisecond before he told you, which made you feel really clever. I’ve talked to other people who said that was exactly how they felt too. So you felt good talking to him because it made you feel really smart.

Douglas was regularly at Three on the Beaton Scale when writing
Dirk Gently.
It was very uphill, and the complexity of the narrative reflects the discontinuously dripping tap of his inspiration. Sue Freestone spent a lot of time in Upper Street (at this point he had not yet moved into Duncan Terrace) providing sandwiches, encouragement and warmly appreciative feedback. After a particularly pleasing page, he would run downstairs from his office like a child who had done something praiseworthy and give it to Sue, inspecting her with neurotic care to see if she laughed in the right places.

The schedule for the book was so tight that it was almost a conveyor belt with Douglas at one end and the reading public at the other. By writing on his Apple Macintosh Plus and printing the text on a laser printer as camera-ready copy, Douglas cut out several intermediate processes and shaved a couple of weeks off the production time.

Dirk Gently
was his first book entirely free of the structural inheritance that comes from converting one medium into another. It even looks different on the page, and resists slipping comfortably into the category straitjacket. Douglas’s own quote on the back of the first edition (and still there today) describes his first Dirk Gently thus: “A THUMPING GOOD DETECTIVE-GHOST-HORROR-WHODUNNIT-TIME TRAVEL-ROMANTIC-MUSICAL-COMEDY-EPIC.”

There is a trajectory to Douglas’s books whereby they seemed to get darker and more cynical with every one. Nevertheless, on publication
Dirk Gently
went straight into the charts. He was particularly pleased by the success of the book, a non
Hitchhiker’s,
because it seemed like confirmation that he was a real writer and not just a man with a single brand.

The next Gently novel was to follow with what was for Douglas remarkable despatch.
The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul
was published by Heinemann in the autumn of 1988 and written from the late summer onwards of 1987. It was his first sane publishing schedule for years, though as always the book was delivered under time pressure because of Douglas’s longstanding and much postponed promise to go to Australia on a promotion tour.

Meanwhile the improbable hero, Dirk Gently, reappears: plump, bespectacled, addicted to cigs, delinquent about money, randy yet unfulfilled, given to gnomic utterances, exploitative, guilty, not entirely wholesome, irritatingly right and possessed of high-powered but unusually non-linear thought processes. Douglas’s friend Michael Bywater shares some of these characteristics and says he is not sure whether to be disgusted or flattered to be thought the model for Gently. Douglas did borrow some of Michael’s attributes, but Douglas’s creative processes were too horribly complicated for portraiture straight from life; besides, a detective who tries to fathom how the hell the world works was so very useful as a vehicle for his interests. The genesis of the character owes a lot to Chandler and to quantum physics.

Characteristically Douglas challenges the stable world view with jokes. For instance, there’s Mr. Rational, in the form of a smug, unkind consultant psychologist called Standish (here I standish and can no other . . . ?), one of whose patients in his hospital in the Cotswolds has been performing automatic writing. She appears to be taking dictation from the ghosts of Einstein, Planck and Heisenberg. Obviously, such a thing is crazy—except that what she takes down is physics of the highest order, throwing light on the greatest goal of them all, Unified Field Theory, sometimes called a Theory of Everything (or T.O.E.).*
 
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Such a theory would be the ultimate triumph of the human spirit. What fun Douglas has in imagining the horror of the scientific mind faced with the paradox of getting such insights from an obviously impossible source.